Recently I had to integrate a photo gallery for one of my work projects Sony Alpha, a new digital SLR camera from Sony. My task was to display both the Exif data and the image at the same time.

For this project I had to create something new which I haven’t found on the internet before. It uses the popular Lytebox extension (a flavour of the popular Lightbox 2 javascript library) combined with a new javascript plugin that gathers Exif Data for photos via javascript with AJAX.

Other conventional methods tend to use a PHP file that grabs the exif data and switches between the data in a tab, but this is the first time I have seen of combining Lytebox with the javascript Exif plugin.

This version of Lytebox actually displays the exif data at the same time as the image. It took me many days to actually make it work but I finally managed it. It still doesn’t work in Opera or Safari but it does work for Firefox and IE.

I will bundle the files into a download so that people can use it and will attach it to this post, but I am very impressed that I managed to create the first javascript gallery that uses javascript to extract the Exif data from a photograph.

IMPORTANT UPDATE – 2008 / 10 /28

I have updated this post to include some Online Examples with the plugin in action! You can also now Download the files. I am sorry it has taken this long to get the files to you guys but it was finding the time to do it.

Hacks + Tweaks for Firefox 3